Rants and Raves on Espresso

Taylor Maid Farms has been a Sonoma County coffee institution since 1993. When the overused term “third wave coffee” was first coined by Wrecking Ball‘s Trish Rothgeb (née Skeie) many years ago, she was roasting here at the time. With locations in “downtown” Sebastopol and inside Copperfield’s Books in San Rafael, in 2013 they moved their Sebastopol flagship café and roasting operations to The Barlow as part of its reinvention and reopening.

The Barlow

The Barlow is a grand attempt at rural renewal. Originally opened in the 1940s as the extensive Barlow apple factory and processing plant, the fortunes of Sebastapol — and its apples — changed with the times. As apples yielded merely a fraction of the crop value when compared to grapes for Sonoma County wines, the apple industry (and the Barlow apple factory) all but perished in the region.

For example, Sebastopol’s infamous Gravenstein apple — a flavorful but not the most supermarket-shelf-friendly apple — had to be rescued from extinction by one of the few Slow Food presidia in the country, an annual apple fair, and other public awareness measures to shore up the county’s agricultural biodiversity.

Meanwhile, the economic changes to the region also created something of a jobs crisis. One solution to the problem arose in the 2013 construction and opening of the nearby Graton Resort & Casino — a nearly $1 billion investment that brought some 1,600 new local jobs. A stark contrast to this approach, and one perhaps much more fitting for the area, was the reinvention of The Barlow.

Inspired by the opening of San Francisco’s Ferry Building Marketplace and Napa’s Oxbow Public Market, The Barlow was reopened in 2013 as a consumer-friendly home to artisinal food, wine, and even coffee production. It’s a vast campus with an extensive network of modernized warehouses, dwarfing the Ferry Building and Oxbow markets. And word from the locals has it that anything served on its grounds carries a number of local production requirements.

Taylor Maid Farms at The Barlow

In front of the shop along McKinley St., Taylor Maid Farms offers some rather extensive front patio seating. Inside there are two levels of café tables and chairs, a wall of coffee and equipment for retail, and a lot of counter and stool seating near open glass garage “delivery” doors. There’s a lot of rough, reclaimed wood paneling, concrete floors, and a large rear space dedicated to their coffee greens and roasting operations.

They cover the electrical outlets here, and the environment responds in social kind by being a somewhat vibrant community space where locals and tourists alike tend to talk to each other instead of zoning out in front of screens. Given the region’s many denizens who look like a Phish tour bus just crashed down the road and scattered the occupants everywhere, this should not come as a surprise.

For retail coffee equipment, they sell everything from a Rancilio Silvia, Aeropress, Clever and Hario drippers, Baratza grinders, and their own trademark cans of roasted coffee (but they also sell it to measure in bags). They offer five different pour-over menu coffees to choose from for either “Brew Bar Hot” (five methods at different prices) and “Brew Bar Cold” (two methods).

Using a two-group La MarzoccoStrada (and three Mazzer grinders), they pull shots with a darker-to-medium brown, even crema and a flavor that blends in bright notes but is otherwise dominated by molasses and chocolate tones. The thinner body is about the only complaint.

Served in black Cremaware cups with a glass of still water on the side. Their milk-frothing can be a little crude, and their drinks tend to run wet/milky rather than dry/foamy. While the macchiato might be a little heavy on milk, the 6-oz cups for their cappuccino keeps it balanced.